In just a few weeks, the festivities for the 2018 Singapore Writers Festival will kick off, and I’m happy to have been invited as a featured author once again (this will make the seventh year in a row). I’ll be around for much of the festival, but here are the events that I’m directly involved with.

My author page is incomplete, and the LONTAR event will not be on the programme (since it’s being organised by BooksActually for the festival bookstore), so please refer to this page for the most complete information.

So yeah, I’m going to be pretty busy with my own events, and I’m super excited to attend David Sedaris’ SWF lecture, “Love, Death and Family Life: Postcards from David Sedaris,” and I’ll be taking Anya to some of the SWF3 (SWF For Families) events, but do please say hello if you see me (likely looking a bit dazed).

The contract has been signed, and so I am elated to announce that Pooja Nansi will be the guest editor of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Four! Yay, w00t and huzzah!

I’ve long wanted to work with Pooja on a project, and I’m so delighted that she’s agreed to curate our fourth volume of BNSSS (to be released by Epigram Books in October 2019). I’m a great admirer of her poetry and performance (Love is an Empty Barstool is one of my all-time favourite Singaporean poetry collections), her commitment as an educator (both as a teacher and as Singapore’s first Youth Poet Ambassador), and her eagerness to pay it forward by spearheading the incredible spoken word / reading series Speakeasy. And though she’s known primarily as a Young Artist Award-winning poet, she has a finely discerning eye for prose as well, and I can’t wait to see what stories she selects for the anthology.

As before, we are only considering previously published short stories by Singaporean writers. We will be already looking at notable lit journals as well anthologies and single-author collections by major Singaporean publishers. However, if you would like to recommend a published short story under 10,000 words, you can shoot me an email, and I’ll pass it along.

The contracts have at last been signed, so I can officially announce that Epigram Books will be publishing two books by me next year, scheduled for March and October, respectively: a novella called The Diary of One Who Disappeared (recipient of the 2013 NAC Creation Grant), and a “greatest hits” short story collection called Most Excellent and Lamentable (with an introduction by Dean Francis Alfar). Yay!

I’ve resisted submitting my own fiction to Epigram Books for a long time, because it felt a bit strange publishing fiction at the company where I’m the fiction editor. But I’m glad that it’ll be happening, and that I’ll be working with my colleague Eldes Tran to shape both of these manuscripts.

This all came about when I proposed reprinting Red Dot Irreal to my publisher, Edmund Wee, since the first edition is now out of print in Singapore (even if you can still find the Infinity Plus edition online). He countered with putting together a new collection, and I came up with the idea of doing a Selected Stories book that draws from my three previous collections, as well as one uncollected story and a brand new one written specifically for this book. Here are the contents:

The Stargirl and the Potter

Always a Risk

Wombat Fishbone

King of Hearts

Strange Mammals

Great Responsibility

The Time Traveller’s Son

Slowly Slowly Slowly

Kopi Luwak

Complications of the Flesh

Most Excellent and Lamentable

Bodhisattva at the Heat Death of the Universe

Bogeymen

Ikan Berbudi (Wise Fish)

At the same, I pitched my long-languishing novella, which my (now ex-)agent had not done anything with for four years, and thankfully Edmund agreed to take it as well. But after receiving some additional feedback, I realised that it didn’t address the world that we’re living in now, which is very different from the optimism and openness of four years ago. So I’m currently revising the manuscript to make it more relevant (and, frankly, better), and aiming at a mid-August deadline to turn it in.

So yeah, two new works of fiction by me out next year. It’s nice to be out in front of my own writing again. 🙂

“The Stargirl and the Potter” was published last July in Daily Science Fiction. Thank you again to editors Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden for taking the story and giving it such a nice home. Here’s how it starts:

I tell you this tale as it was told to me so very long ago.

She appeared one day in the town. Nobody knew where she had come from, or who her family might be, or what she was called, or why her skin glowed ever-so-slightly with a sparkling luminescence. Nobody saw her enter the town from the main road, or alight from a carriage, or dismount from the back of a horse. One moment she was not there, and the next she was. Although she had a laugh that filled the air with musicality, she did not speak; after some time, most came to the conclusion that she simply did not wish to. She kept her thoughts to herself, and so the townspeople collectively named her the Stargirl.

And here’s the author’s note I wrote to accompany it:

“The Stargirl and the Potter” had three sources of inspiration: 1) Pablo Neruda’s love poem “The Potter” (from the collection The Captain’s Verses), 2) Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (about a very different kind of stranger who comes to town), and 3) a former lover with a celestial nickname. Having lived in Singapore for over a decade, I’ve written about the island-nation and the wider region for quite some time, but I needed to depart from that focus with this story; it felt more “Wild West” to me, a calm tale set in a steampunk frontier (although the locale is purposefully ambiguous). It was written as a Christmas gift, and as an optimistic expression of love, which I was pleasantly surprised still existed after my divorce. It is also about acceptance, respect, and healing, and is almost gleefully free from conflict. It is a gentle story, an urban legend, a fairy tale. All of it is true, except the parts that are not.

Read the story here, and if you feel moved to nominate it for something, that’s awesome. If not, that’s cool too. I’m just glad it’s out there.

* Two other of my stories also appeared last year in Alluvium: The Journal of Literary Shanghai, “Bodhisattva at the Heat Death of the Universe” and “Occupy: An Exhibition“, but they were reprinted from my collections Strange Mammals and Red Dot Irreal (Revised Edition), respectively, and are therefore not eligible for awards consideration for 2018.

(Note: much of this was included in my review on Goodreads, but this book is so exceptional that I wanted to give it a bit more attention here.)

One of the best parts of getting invited to moderate a panel discussion at a convention or literary festival is encountering the work of writers you might not have ordinarily come across. Such was the case with Dorothy Tse, who appeared on one of my panels at the 2017 George Town Literary Festival.

Tse writes in Chinese and reads in Cantonese, and is highly regarded for her stories in her native Hong Kong. However, those of us who read in English now have the extraordinary fortune to have Nicky Harman’s lyrical translation of Snow and Shadow, an extraordinary collection of oneiric pieces that feel at home next to the best of Angela Carter and Kelly Link.

I LOVED this collection, and highly recommend it to anyone into surreal and strange short fiction. It was far and away my favourite book read in 2017. Check out these reviews at Words Without Borders and World Literature Today, and read Tse’s interview answers for The PEN Ten.

Dorothy Tse’s is a voice that deserves a wide and appreciative audience. However you can find this book, do so; you’ll thank me.

We’re barrelling headlong towards Xmas, and I just wanted to give a holiday reminder of where you can find my books (if you felt inclined to give them as gifts), with a special focus on independent bookshops, which are the heart and soul of bookselling worldwide.

* My titles from Infinity Plus are available for order at any bookstore in the IndieBound network, but I wanted to emphasise these three in particular, and especially Quail Ridge, which is my favourite bookshop in all of the USA.

** I recognise that Kinokuniya is a chain with stores all over the world, but the main Singaporean store on Orchard Road has been extraordinarily supportive of me and my career, and the folks who work there are so knowledgeable that it feels like an indie.

I had a phenomenal time at the 2017 George Town Literary Festival last month. After the insanity of the Singapore Writers Festival (over 25,000 in attendance, a 25% jump from last year!), it was wonderful to attend a more intimate festival, even if it also boasted its highest-ever attendance at 4,500 people. Both the panels I moderated were very well-attended, and I got to see existing friends and make some wonderful new ones. As well as patronise the very well maintained festival bookstore run by Gerakbudaya Bookshop. George Town is a lovely place to spend a long weekend, and the festival was run expertly well; I can’t thank all the organisers, staff and volunteers enough for making it such an enjoyable experience.

I had such a great time that I often forgot to take photos, but here are just a few.

With Jelena Dinic and Laksmi Pamuntjak after the Opening Ceremony

With Marc de Faoite and Sonny Liew in the festival bookstore

The festival bookstore run by Gerakbudaya was kind enough to stock some of my books

This weekend, I’ll be returning to Penang for the 2017 George Town Literary Festival, and I’m delighted to have been asked back as a moderator. And after the almost overwhelming craziness of SWF, it’ll be nice to discuss books and writing in a more intimate setting. I’ll be attending a bunch of panels and readings, as well as the award ceremony for the inaugural Penang Monthly Book Prize (for which Bernice Chauly’s novel Once We Were There, which I edited, is shortlisted), but here are the events that I’m directly involved with:

Speculative, dystopian and fantastical genres have always been a challenge for some, but not for others. These four writers have defined and re-defined the genres they work in and continue to create worlds that defy our imaginations. How do they revision the future and the past? How does the writer act as an agent for the in-between of what is real, plausible and fantastical? And is this the way of writing the future?

There are many commonalities in the world’s mythologies and cosmologies. Greek legends, Norse and Celtic sagas, and Hindu epics all had gods and goddesses who were anthropomorphic and therefore resistant to Joseph Campbell’s argument – ‘that the secret cause of all suffering is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life.’ Did the immortals deny humans the right to live uninterrupted, guilt-free lives? What is the notion of ‘god’ and its mythos in literature? We examine some of our most enduring myths, the power they still wield in our everyday lives and narratives, and how these stories have evolved from then until now.

Tonight, the festivities for the 2017 Singapore Writers Festival will kick off, and I’m happy to have been invited as a featured author again this year. I’ll be around for most of the festival, but here are the events that I’m directly involved with.

On 11 August at 10:00 in the morning, I moderated a panel at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, called “Surreal Worlds of Southeast Asia“. Joining me were Aliette de Bodard and Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, two great writers whom I admire, and we had a fascinating discussion about speculative fiction in and about Southeast Asia; they also discussed their work and I talked a bit about LONTAR (which needs your help right now).

The audience was a decent size for a 10am event, and I discovered afterward that all the copies of Red Dot Irreal and LONTAR that I brought sold out at the convention. I was very happy to see that we had spread the word, and hopefully folks will go looking for more Southeast Asian speculative writing in the future.

As with Volumes One and Two, a list Honourable Mentions appears in the back of the book; these were stories that guest editor Cyril Wong and I thought had merit, and even though they didn’t make the anthology, they are very much still worth reading:

I am very proud to announce the contents and cover design for the third volume of the Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series, guest edited by Cyril Wong, to be published in October 2017 by Epigram Books, and launched at Kinokuniya later that month.

The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Three gathers the finest Singaporean stories published in 2015 and 2016, selected from hundreds published in journals, magazines, anthologies and single-author collections. Accompanying the stories are the editor’s preface and an extensive list of honourable mentions for further reading.

Here is the table of contents:

Cyril Wong | Preface

Jason Erik Lundberg | Introduction

Yeo Wei Wei | These Foolish Things

Yeoh Jo-Ann | The Thing

Jennifer Anne Champion | See It Coming

Jon Gresham | Walking Backwards Up Bukit Timah Hill

Ovidia Yu | Salvation Solution

Andrew Cheah | A Century of Loneliness

Daryl Qilin Yam | Thing Language

Jason Wee | The City Beneath the City

Amanda Lee Koe | Last Night I Dreamt That Harry Was In Love With Me

Sam Ng | Prices

Yeow Kai Chai | Dark Shades

Andrew Yuen | Love in a Time of Dying

Joelyn Alexandra | Junk Mail

Leonora Liow | Falling Water

SC Gordon | Claire

Nuraliah Norasid | Madam Jamilah’s Family Portrait

Jollin Tan | Better Places

Noelle Q. de Jesus | In the End

Su Leong | Peelings

Verena Tay | The Sensualist

Eva Aldea | Baba Ganoush

Melissa De Silva | It Happened at Mount Pleasant

O Thiam Chin | Campfire

Clara Chow | Want Less

Philip Holden | Library

Manish Melwani | The Tigers of Bengal

Please join us for the book launch at Kinokuniya Neo SIMS (the main store on Orchard Road) on 28 October at 2:30pm. Cyril and I will be co-moderating, and the event will feature contributors Nuraliah Norasid, Clara Chow and Melissa De Silva.

In about 32 hours, I will be on a plane bound for Worldcon 75 in Helsinki! The previous (and only) World Science Fiction Convention I attended was in Baltimore in 1998, nearly 20 years ago, and I haven’t been able to attend any conventions in the 10 years since moving to Singapore, so I’m very excited to throw myself into sf fandom once again. I’ve also never traveled to any of the Nordic countries, despite being one-quarter Swedish; the closest I’ve gotten is IKEA in Singapore (which ain’t the same). I’m also beside myself with anticipation at Helsinki’s autumnal weather right now, which will be a welcome break from the tropical heat and humidity of my adopted home.

I’m only participating in one programming event, which I’m moderating; here are the details:

Panel: Surreal Worlds of Southeast Asia (moderator)
with Aliette de Bodard and Victor Fernando R. Ocampo
Messukeskus Helsinki, Expo and Convention Centre, Room 204, 1000-1100am
Southeast Asia—a subregion of the world made up of 11 countries and over 620 million people—is undergoing a renaissance in speculative fiction. More and more authors from the region are spreading their strange stories to the rest of the world, aided by publications such as the long-running Philippine Speculative Fiction anthology series and LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction. In this panel moderated by LONTAR‘s founding editor, Jason Erik Lundberg, two authors from Southeast Asia and its diaspora, Aliette de Bodard (France/Vietnam) and Victor Fernando R. Ocampo (Philippines), discuss their works in the context of worldwide speculative fiction in English, and the challenges that come with bringing their authentic voices to a global audience.

Otherwise, I’ll be wandering through the dealers’ room (and likely buying too many books), checking out the art show, attending panels and readings and kaffeeklatsches and the Hugo Awards ceremony, catching up with friends, and also exploring Helsinki itself. This is the first actual vacation I’ve had in years, and I’ll be taking full advantage of it.

I’m also bringing copies of Fish Eats Lion, several (though not all) issues of LONTAR, and the now out-of-print first edition of Red Dot Irreal, for sale at the Independent Authors table in the Trade Hall. Because I have to haul them myself all the way from Singapore, I won’t be bringing many copies, so they might go fast; better to snag them sooner than later.

I still have some last-minute things to take care of today and tomorrow, and then I’ll be flying to Finland! Yay Worldcon!

POP AYE, the first feature film by Singaporean auteur Kirsten Tan, is out now in theatres in Singapore for what will likely be a limited run. It has already won a Special Jury Prize in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, and the VPRO Big Screen Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It’s gotten a lot of international attention; the Hollywood Reporter called it “an assured and noteworthy feature debut”.

Here’s the synopsis:

POP AYE is a road movie with an elephant set in Thailand. It tells the story of Thana, a disenchanted architect, who bumps into Popeye, his long-lost childhood elephant, on the streets of Bangkok. Dissatisfied with his current life in the city, Thana takes his elephant on a road trip across Thailand, in search of the rural farm where they grew up together.

Along the way, they meet a host of characters—a fortune-telling vagabond, a pokerfaced policeman, a crematorium monk, a lonely transsexual karaoke singer—who colour their journey, as various mishaps (sometimes absurd, sometimes poignant, sometimes both absurd and poignant at once) befall them on the road.

I saw the film on opening night last Thursday, and it blew me away. Tan’s voice as an independent filmmaker is assured and empathetic, and she coaxed incredible performances from her cast of non-professional actors (including one very expressive elephant). She did a Q&A for the night, and the discussion about her writing and development process was fascinating; it took her three years of just working on the script before filming a single scene, and she worked incredibly closely with several Thai translators to make sure that the dialogue worked in both English and Thai.

Because this is an indie film, it won’t stay in theatres here for very long, but attendance right now can help to prolog the run. If you’re in Singapore, it’s playing right now at Golden Village cinemas at Plaza Singapura and VivoCity, but I recommend seeing it at The Projector (Singapore’s only art-house theatre) if you can.

If I could put on my editor’s hat for a moment, four of my authors at Epigram Books, as well as your humble narrator, will be appearing this Saturday afternoon at Kinokuniya’s Singapore main store as part of their World Book Day celebrations!

At 2pm, I will be moderating a panel on “Worlds Beyond Words” with our #EBFP2015-longlisted authors: Daryl Qilin Yam, Imran Hashim and Kevin Martens Wong. All three of their first novels (Kappa Quartet, Annabelle Thong and Altered Straits) go beyond Singapore’s shores to other places (and in Kevin’s case, to parallel worlds), so the discussion should be a fascinating one.

My agent, Kristopher O’Higgins (Scribe Agency), is currently shopping around two pieces of my long-form fiction, and I realized recently that there’s almost no trace of them here at my website (aside from a brief mention in my bio). So I’ve decided to put up a preview of each work, just a few thousand words, to give y’all a taste, and hopefully whet your appetite for more:

A Fickle and Restless Weapon — a 130,000-word Calvino-esque psychological novel about transnational characters using varied art forms to struggle against a Southeast Asian surveillance state. With explosions.

Quek Zhou Ma (who goes under the stage name Zed), an internationally successful dramatist, arrives home in the equatorial island-nation of Tinhau after a long absence in order to attend the funeral of his older sister, who has committed suicide by train. As he deals with conflicting feelings about a homeland he hardly recognizes, and the lingering questions surrounding his sister’s death, he decides to produce a lavish spare-no-expense production in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture, but opening night is marred by a nearby bombing attributed to a local resistance group calling themselves PAKATAN.

Tara, a transplanted Indian by way of America, works for the Ministry of Culture as a graphic designer, and leads Buddhist meditation circles on the weekends, which is where she first meets Zed. With an uncanny knack for both reading and influencing the behavior of others, she has found herself uneasily associated with PAKATAN, and despite her stance on non-violence she is charged with bringing Zed over to the cause. But as the pair begin to grow closer, she has doubts about whether she can complete her task.

Vahid Nabizadeh, Zed’s creative partner and a master puppeteer, stays in Tinhau after the end of their production. An Iranian Briton, already once removed from his native country, he finds a home in the culture and cuisine of Tinhau, and an unlikely friendship with Kelvin de Vries, an Indo-Dutch son of Tinhau’s most successful business magnate. As Vahid comes to grips with his new life, he inadvertently becomes embroiled in political and financial intrigue that threatens to unbalance the stability of the government itself.

A Fickle and Restless Weapon explores the relationships between these characters, and the ways that they deal with their disaffected identities, as well as the disruption and chaos that occurs when Tinhau is abruptly attacked by the Range, a mysterious cloud formation that appears without warning and destroys without mercy, a weapon as fickle and restless as the human mind.

***

The Diary of One Who Disappeared — a 30,000-word novella that takes place 25 years after the events of A Fickle and Restless Weapon, and shares the same fantastical milieu (but can be read as a standalone piece).

Peak oil, the climate crisis, and the economic collapse of the USA in the late 20th century have impacted Tinhau, one of many countries that has depended heavily on the American capitalist engine; yet Tinhau’s government not only has survived the shock, but appears to be thriving.

Lucas Lehrer is a minor functionary in the Department of Economic and Spiritual Development, headquartered at the North American Union’s capitol in New York City. He is tasked with traveling from the NAU to Tinhau via airship to liaise with officials there and extend the offer of partnership. Lucas’s immediate supervisor on the mission is his estranged wife Ailene, and he hopes that the trip will also reinvigorate their failing marriage.

After arriving at their destination, they are met with religious and cultural differences that cause negotiations to break down. Ailene announces her intention of divorce as soon as they return to NYC, and in an act of rebellion Lucas decides to request asylum to stay in Tinhau. As he begins his new job at Tinhau’s Ministry of Stability, he encounters an odd series of coincidences, in which his deep-seated desires start coming true. He also befriends an emerging Chinese-language poet named Yu-Wei, a young woman who is not what she seems, and who may not be from our universe at all.

I was recently asked by Gareth Richards of Gerakbudaya Bookshop in Penang to pick the three best books I read that were published in 2016. It was a real challenge narrowing it down to only three (I could have easily listed 20 or 30), but in the end I chose one graphic novel / collected comics volume (Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda), one short fiction collection (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu), and one novel (The Question of Red by Laksmi Pamuntjak), the last of which I want to talk just a bit more about.

Laksmi Pamuntjak has published collections of verse and short stories, and five editions of the Jakarta Good Food Guide. She is proficiently bilingual in both Indonesian and English, and has translated two works of Indonesian poet and essayist Goenawan Mohamad. The Question of Red was first published in Indonesian in 2012 by Gramedia Pustaka Utama, and became an instant hit. The German edition did so as well, winning the LiBeraturpreis in 2016, appearing on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s Top 8 list of the best books of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2015, and being named best work of fiction from Asia, America, Latin America, and the Caribbean translated into German on the Weltempfaenger (Receivers of the World) list.

An English translation was hurriedly produced by Gramedia in 2013, but Laksmi later did a ground-up revisiting of the text, transcreating the novel in English, and this is the edition published earlier this year by AmazonCrossing in the US and by Speaking Tiger in the Indian Subcontinent.

I met Laksmi when she was a featured author at the 2015 Singapore Writers Festival, and she signed my copy of the Indonesia-only limited English edition (which may now be a collector’s item, as it’s now out of print), but urged me to find the new edition in 2016 and read it instead. Which is what I did. And no other novel I read this year came even close to what an amazing book this is. You can find the description and effusive blurbs on the author’s official book page, so I won’t rehash them here, except to say that I LOVED this novel. It took me two months to read, which is a long time for me, even for a book of this size, because I kept stopping to savour the writing and the imagery and the depth of feeling that infuses every page. I’m just in awe of how epic and heartbreaking it is, and written so beautifully. The Question of Red is an amazing work of art, tackling darkness and redemption and love, and it inspires me to get back to my own writing pronto.

And I was puzzled that the novel has frankly received little attention in the American book world. It’s gotten a few reviews, but none yet in mainstream literary publications. It is unfortunately entirely possible that it has been overlooked by review venues and bookstores because of its Amazonian association (which, if true, is an incredible shame). I am no fan of Amazon myself, but I’m quite willing to put that aside in order to help shine a bigger light on this incredible novel.

The list price of the book on Amazon is $14.95, but it’s marked down to $8.67, which is already an incredible deal. However, starting now and continuing for the next three months, the book is absolutely free to read as part of the Prime Reading program in the US. Meaning that until the end of March, if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can read the book for zero dollars (you should automatically see the “Read for Free” option).

You owe it to yourself to read this remarkable book, and with prices so low (or free), there’s really no reason not to. And once you’ve read it, do leave a review on the Amazon page. Go on, make this one of your New Year’s resolutions.

This past weekend, I flew up to Penang for the 2016 George Town Literary Festival. It was my first time in Penang, and I definitely want to go back when I actually have the time to check the place out. George Town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and so many beautiful old buildings are protected, including Wisma Yeap Chor Ee (WYCE), which was the main GTLF venue. (Although this meant no air-conditioning during some very sweltering days.)

I had a wonderful time seeing some familiar faces (Marc de Faoite, Sharon Bakar, Amanda Lee Koe, Tash Aw, Darryl Whetter), as well as making new friends (James Scudamore, Tishani Doshi, Jérôme Bouchaud, Faisal Tehrani, Ismail Gareth Richards, Amir Muhammad). I was also happy to finally meet the indefatigable Bernice Chauly in person; we’ve been Facebook friends for years, and I’ll be editing her first novel for Epigram Books in 2017.

The festival theme, Hiraeth, was threaded throughout the many panels and readings over the weekend, in explorations of longing, homelands, identity, and the role of fiction. It was a privilege to hear from such thoughtful writers who’d come from all over the world to talk about their work in the context of this framework.

A couple of months ago, I was approached by Goodstuph, a brand manager and advertising agency in Singapore, about writing a new children’s picture book for a campaign they were doing with development company Keppel Land, concerning marine ecosystem conservation in Keppel Bay. As part of their “Homes in the Sea” initiative, they’ve been growing young coral in a nursery and then transplanting them to an existing coral reef at King’s Dock.

After meeting and discussing the idea, I came up with Carol the Coral, a story about a feisty young coral who discovers King’s Dock while looking for a new home, and who must contend with a grumpy clam who wants the spot that she has claimed. The book was to consist of four chapters, all of which had to be approved by the client, and after a bit of fumbling at the beginning while trying to understand what they were looking for, I sent them a plot summary for each chapter, and then got to work on breaking these down on the page level.

Once the text was written, artist Annabella Goh went to work on adapting it visually and laying out the text on each page. And she did such an amazing job enhancing the story through her whimsical art style. Carol is incredibly cute (while also quite capable of handling herself), and there were even some surprises that made me laugh out loud (such as seeing the pistol shrimp henchmen in chapter 3 really look like gangsters; one has a missing eye, and the other wears a trilby).

Chapter 1 was released at the Keppel Land Live FB page on 28 May, and each subsequent chapter every three or four days later; the final chapter went up today! Each chapter is introduced with a question to the viewer, and if you answer correctly, you’re put in the running to win to tickets to the new Pixar film, Finding Dory! (Which I’m totally taking Anya to see in the theatre.) The contest ends on 12 June 2016, 11.59pm UTC+08:00, so don’t delay!

In addition, Keppel Land will be producing a limited-edition print book that publishes the entire story. As much as I wish it would be available in bookstores along with my other books, they’re not interested in becoming a publisher, and will only be using the book for giveaways. So really, the best way for you to see it is online.

I have to say that this has been a great experience, and I’ve learned a lot from it. I had the preconceived notion that doing corporate work would be soul-deadening, but the collaboration with Anna, and the working relationship with the folks at both Keppel Land and Goodstuph, has been quite fulfilling! Also, since Bo Bo and Cha Cha is currently on hiatus, I’m especially glad to have a new picture book come out this year.

We lost David Bowie earlier this week. I caught the news in my Facebook feed, and sat there in mute shock for five seconds before screaming, “No!” (luckily I was home at the time). When I was able to recover my wits, I wrote this:

David Bowie is one of those artists you think will always be there. He reinvented himself again and again, and I really didn’t think he would ever stop, he’d just keep on going, like a never-ending regeneration of himself, outliving us all, becoming post-human, then post-post-human, bringing his music to other worlds, other universes.

He was in the background of my musical tastes for a long time, but I got big into his music in the mid-90s, with his contribution to the soundtrack of David Lynch’s film Lost Highway, and the release of the albums Outside and Earthling, and his collaborations with Nine Inch Nails. I was encouraged by a friend to explore his post-Ziggy Berlin Trilogy—Low, “Heroes” and Lodger—which became some of my favourite albums.

His death hits especially hard since his new album, ★ (aka Blackstar, which I’m listening to right now), just came out a few days ago, and he looked just as full of life in the pre-release music videos for it. I’m sad that he won’t get to fully enjoy the accolades for ★, many of which are calling it one of Bowie’s best in years, but as an artist, I am very glad that he was able to witness its release, his final work of art.

All this week, I have come back again and again to Bowie, to his music, to his interviews, to his list of favourite books, to his acting roles. I haven’t been able to work up to watching Labyrinth, because I just don’t know if I could handle it yet. Like so very many of his fans and friends, his death took me by complete surprise (although there is much supposition that ★ was purposefully created as his final goodbye), and I’ve been in mourning. I’ve listened to the new album almost a dozen times. But it wasn’t until today, when I was scanning his discography and Wikipedia entries once again, that I found out something interesting about probably my favourite Bowie album, Outside (released in 1995): he and Brian Eno had planned on revisiting it. And not only that, it was originally planned as the first of five albums “to chronicle the final five years of the millennium” (which is why the title is listed as 1.Outside on the cover art, something I always wondered about).

According to Wikipedia, the proposed second album was to be called Contamination (or 2.Contamination), and this has set my imagination ablaze, especially since neither this, nor the other three albums in the series, was ever made, despite over 20 hours of improvised studio material. (Bowie’s follow-up was the 1997 drum-and-bass electronic extravaganza Earthling.)

In case you’re unaware, Outside is a concept album, like many of Bowie’s albums, but unlike The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars or others, the concept exists beyond the songs themselves and bleeds onto the liner notes in the form of a short story, “The Diary of Nathan Adler“, which reveals a murder mystery investigated by a noirish (or maybe “noird” or “weirdboiled”) detective who specialises in “Art-Crime”. Nathan interacts throughout the album with an eclectic cast of Pynchonesque characters, including ex-convict Leon Blank, underground art-crime dealer Ramona A. Stone (who is also Nathan’s former lover), supposed “broken man” Algeria Touchshriek, and teenage art-crime victim ‘Baby’ Grace Blue. A serial killer referred to only as The Minotaur is the object of Nathan’s quest, and at various points Leon, Ramona and Algeria are considered either suspects or accomplices, before it’s revealed that Nathan himself is The Minotaur (in “I’m Deranged”, my favourite song on the album).

What I love so much about this album, besides the mid-90s industrial musical style Bowie largely employs, and the collaboration with Brian Eno, is this narrative throughline (which is examined in detail at Concept Album Corner). A work of speculative crime fiction (since it takes place in the then near future of 1999), with hints at the larger story, and some truly disturbing visual and aural details (the description of ‘Baby’ Grace Blue’s evisceration and dismemberment as a work of Art still makes me shudder). And I can only imagine the story of Contamination. Nathan is caught at the end of Outside and arrested as The Minotaur, but does his story end there? Is he destroyed by the state, or does he escape his confinement? Would Leon, Ramona or Algeria have returned, or would there have been an entirely new cast of characters?

In some alternate universe out there, Bowie and Eno succeeded in making Contamination and the rest of the series. I can only mourn the loss of those innovative and disruptive albums, just as I mourn the loss of that innovative and disruptive musician today.

A Thanksgiving announcement: the paperwork has just been finalized, and I am now officially divorced.

This may come as a shock to some of you, and to others it may be no big surprise at all. I have not posted any updates about or photos of Janet here at the blog or on Facebook for a very long time, and that could have been seen as wanting to respect her privacy or a symptom that we were no longer together (it was both).

We’ve been physically separated for several years now, but emotionally separated for far longer. This resolution was a long time in coming, and both of us are much happier living apart and sharing custody of Anya than living in tension-filled deeply uncomfortable togetherness. We’re even working slowly toward becoming friends again.

“Divorce is always good news. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce. It’s really that simple. That would be sad; if two people were married and they were really happy and they just had a great thing, and then they got divorced, that would be really sad. But that has happened zero times. Literally zero.”

For the curious, I do plan to stay in Singapore for the foreseeable future. I’ve made a life here now independent of my ex-wife, and Anya is starting primary school in January. Over the eight and a half years that I’ve lived here, I’ve really come to appreciate the intrinsic sense of stability and safety, and feel like I’m making a genuine contribution to the literary scene both as an author and editor.

This is a new phase of my life, but I’ll be fine. The destabilizing months (and years) are for the most part behind me, and things have settled into a manageable pattern. I’ve got a brilliant little girl and some wonderful friends keeping me honest and sane and able to laugh at life’s absurdities, which is something definitely to be thankful for. Onward.

If you missed the recent launch of A Curious Bundle for Bo Bo and Cha Cha at the Singapore Writers Festival, you have another chance to see me publicly launch the book and do a storytelling session from it. I’ll be conducting a mini-whistlestop tour this Saturday the 14th at Woods in the Books‘ two locations: at their flagship store in Tiong Bahru at 1130am, and then at Books Ahoy! (on level 2 of the Orchard FORUM) at 300pm.

As with the SWF launch, my daughter Anya will be along to help me out, and to voice the little baby animal in the story (which is beyond cute, so you have to come). See you there!

The Singapore Writers Festival is once again upon us, and I will be participating heavily once again (although not as a featured writer this time). If you want to catch me during the festival, I’ll be around with Anya in tow, but I’ll definitely be at the following events:

Book 6 in my panda picture book series, A Curious Bundle for Bo Bo and Cha Cha, has just arrived from the printers! It can be ordered right now online directly from Epigram Books, and will be stocked in bookstores all over Singapore within a couple of weeks.

I know I say this with every new BB&CC book, but this one is probably my favourite. Back when I thought that this would be the final one*, I decided that it would call back to the previous books in the series, so you’ll find many, many characters you’ve encountered already. It was a challenge to do this without confusing potential readers (especially the little ones), but editor Sheri Tan and I came up with a smooth way to do so that works quite well. Also, I’m quite proud with the pacing and rhythm; a lot happens, but it’s a page-turner.

So I’m very proud that this story is now a fully realised book, and that it will be available for kids everywhere very very soon. If you would like to review it for a newspaper, magazine or litblog, please contact Sophia Susanto, the Sales & Marketing Executive at Epigram Books. Again, you can sample the book here and/or order a copy right now from the Epigram Books website, and rate/review it on Goodreads.

Yay!

* A Curious Bundle for Bo Bo and Cha Cha is the last book currently under contract with Epigram Books, although my publisher has already said informally that he’d be happy to sign me up for two more.

Jason Erik Lundberg was born in New York, grew up in North Carolina, and has lived in Singapore since 2007. He is the author and anthologist of over twenty books, including The Diary of One Who Disappeared: A Novella, Most Excellent and Lamentable: Selected Stories, the Bo Bo and Cha Cha picture book series, and the biennial Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series. More info here.